Abstract

Communicative auditory signals express their structure through acoustic dimensions such as pitch and timing. Individuals' abilities to perceive these dimensions vary widely, and yet most people seem to comprehend music and speech easily. How? Here we tested whether redundancy - multiple acoustic cues indexing the same feature - makes music and speech robust to such individual differences. A model population with a severe and specific deficit for perceiving pitch (congenital amusics) and controls completed 3 tasks, each testing whether they could take advantage of redundancy. In each task, performance relied on either pitch or duration perception alone, or both together redundantly. Results showed that when redundant cues are present, even people with a severe deficit for one type of cue can rely on another to improve their performance. This suggests that redundancy may be a design feature of music and language, one that assures transmission between people with diverse perceptual abilities.

Copyright

The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.